World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (23 page)

She came in naturally, as if nothing had happened, like any ordinary girl returning from work and feeling glad to get home. Only I knew that she was only acting to try and make me believe it was like that, and that inside she was tensed up, waiting to know how I felt.

“I finished early tonight,” she said. “That bar was too noisy. I got tired.”

I did not say anything. She took off her brocade jacket and slipped it on a hanger. She hooked the hanger over the rail in the wardrobe, on the left side where she always hung her clothes. She closed the wardrobe door, avoiding my eyes. She pretended to examine her hand.

“I got a splinter this morning, only I can't find it. Can you see a splinter?” She held her hand out to me.

I said, “Suzie, it's no good.”

She withdrew her hand and lifted her face, and looked at me with her eyes steady.

“You don't want me?” she said.

“Of course I want you, Suzie. But not like this. Can't you understand?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don't understand. You loved me yesterday, didn't you?”

“Yes, very much.”

“And I am just the same person as yesterday. I went away to do my job, and now I come back, and nothing has changed. I am just the same person.”

“I still can't bear it, Suzie.”

“All right—we finish.”

She turned and went back to the wardrobe. She pulled open the door and removed her jacket. The hanger swung emptily on the rail. She put on the jacket without looking at me. She closed the wardrobe again and went to the door.

“Suzie!”

“Yes?”

We stood looking at each other. “Suzie, this is awful.”

She turned away and opened the door, then hesitated and looked at me again.

“I love you very much, you know, Robert. I love you as much as my baby—maybe more. Only you're a big grown-up man, and my baby is just small. My baby needs me. So I must think of my baby first. You understand?”

“Yes, Suzie.”

“All right; I go now.”

She went out and closed the door. I listened to her steps fading down the corridor. A sailor raised his voice, arguing truculently with Ah Tong. “Sonofabitch, you . . .” The clank of the lift gates. A sudden muffled outbreak of giggles—Little Alice. Nobody else giggled quite like Little Alice. I went out onto the balcony. The wicker chair creaked as I sat down. The giggles suddenly stopped. A door slammed. A merchant ship slid silently out of the harbor, trailing pale ghostly smoke like ectoplasm under the great cool quicksilver disk of the moon.

The next day I did not see Suzie. I stayed in my room all day waiting for her knock but she did not come. I did not go down to the bar. I was afraid to see her with the sailors.

The next day was the same. And the next. But on the following day I could bear it no longer and made up my mind to go and find her. I went to the door. Just then there was a knock and Ah Tong came in with a fresh teapot. He looked uneasy and avoided my eyes. I asked him what was the matter.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Then why daren't you look at me, Ah Tong?”

He turned his eyes to me reluctantly. “You know Mr. Tessler has left, sir?”

“Rodney—left?”

“Yes, this morning, sir.”

I said, “Go on, Ah Tong.”

He dropped his eyes.

“He has taken your girl friend, sir. They have gone to Bangkok.”

Chapter Seven

A
ctually Ah Tong was mistaken because, although Rodney intended to take Suzie to Bangkok, they had not yet left the Colony. I heard this later from Gwenny, who had seen them just before their departure from the Nam Kok. It seemed that Suzie, not trusting Rodney, and foreseeing the possibility of finding herself abandoned in a strange country, had prudently insisted on a trial period with him first; and so they had gone to stay at a small hotel in the New Territories, about twelve miles outside Kowloon. This hotel was on an attractive part of the mainland coast, and was popular with Europeans and Chinese alike, especially with honeymoon and weekending couples. Suzie had taken along the baby and amah, and had installed them in a room in a fishing village near by.

In a way it was worse that they were still in the neighborhood, and I think I would have preferred it if they had gone right away. Every night I dreamed of Suzie. I dreamed that she had come back, and that I stood working at my easel while she sat cross-legged on the bed with mischievously twinkling eyes. And one night I dreamed that we were at the races again, holding hands in the crowd, and that Rodney appeared ahead of us—a huge lean grotesque Rodney like some half-starved bird of prey—and that I clung to Suzie in terror of him taking her away; but he went past in the crowd and the terror left me, and I was happy again with Suzie still at my side—until I awoke to find it was morning and it had all been a dream. I felt out across the bed to make sure. Yes, empty—gone. I thought of the new day stretching bleakly ahead without her, and the familiar ache came back into my heart; and I closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, to make the day shorter and anesthetize the ache for another hour.

And then when sleep would no longer come I would feed myself on the hope of her dropping in—for since she was only a few miles from Kowloon, surely she would be coming into town for shopping or a film? And in that case wasn't she certain to pay me a visit? And each day, finding half a dozen plausible reasons why she should have chosen this particular day to come into town, I would listen for her arrival, stiffening with tension at every clank of the lift gate, and again and again seeming to recognize her approaching steps. And when once the steps came on right up to my door and were followed by a knock, my heart flew into my mouth, and I dashed across the room in wild grinning excitement, knocking a glass to the floor where it exploded in smithereens, and flung open the door—only to be confronted by Ah Tong, gaping as though he thought I must have gone off my head.

And then one morning I woke up possessed by a new mood—a mood of revulsion for the Nam Kok, and for everybody and everything concerned with it. It was a mood that lasted a long time.

Hitherto I had looked upon the Nam Kok through romantic eyes. I had felt a real affection for it, and above all for the girls; for though it was true that their occupation, the repeated and meaningless offering of their bodies for sexual intercourse with strangers, was essentially degrading, I had never ceased to marvel at how stubbornly they had resisted that degradation; at how they had retained their good manners, their sensitivity, their pride; at how from the supposedly barren soil of commercial sex there could spring such flowers of kindness, tenderness, generosity, love. Nor was it only in Suzie that I had found innocence of heart.

And I had felt no less tolerantly disposed toward the sailors—I had seen their crude sensual search as being not so much for sexual gratification as an end in itself, but as a means to another end: a respite from loneliness. And I had taken no offense at their drunkenness, their carnality; for one had in one's own heart the seeds of all men's behavior, and if one's life had been different—if different circumstances had fertilized those seeds, if they had been blown upon by different winds, known a different and less kindly sun—it might easily have been that one set of seeds would have grown instead of another, that one would have been as crude and as drunk as the worst of them. I had once seen a drunken lout nearly throttle a girl who had refused to go upstairs with him, and had thought, “It could have been me,” and so been able to feel pity. Afterward the girl had pleaded with the bar manager not to hand the man over to the naval police, saying, “He's just done thirty days in the cells, and we don't want him sent back.” And I had been touched to the depths; because it was not only the sailor that she had saved from going back to the cells. It was also me.

But now all that pity was gone. Now my feelings had swung to the other extreme, and I saw the sailors as stupid and brutalized, and their drunkenness and their indiscriminate loveless love-making as shameful to the human race. And even the girls had turned sour on me: I saw the qualities that I had admired in them as being only skin-deep, or else mere pretenses cynically adopted as useful tools for their trade. The good manners were only a deceptive oriental façade; the kindness, the tenderness, the generosity, were but a veneer that thinly covered insensitivity and greed. Innocence of heart? Here I had made my most elementary mistake of all, confusing innocence with ignorance.

This revulsion was accompanied by a complete inability to work; for my work had depended upon a sympathetic feeling for my surroundings, and upon whatever resources I could find in myself of pity and compassion—resources that had never, indeed, been enough, but that were now altogether exhausted. My vision had become fogged by disillusion; and my past work now seemed to me so sentimental, so false, so meretricious, that I could not even look at it without nausea. I lost all impulse to continue. A few weeks ago, standing with palette and brush before a canvas, I had known exactly what I had wanted to achieve, however limited my ability to achieve it; but now I would stand staring at a canvas blankly, without compulsion or motive. It was like setting out on a journey without a map, to a destination in which I had no interest—and at the first excuse I gave up.

One day I received a letter from New York: it was from Mitford's, the gallery-agency owned by Rodney's uncle. Two months previously, when we had still been on comparatively good terms, Rodney had written to his uncle about me, and in reply his uncle had invited me to send samples of my work; and I had duly shipped off a selection of pastels and oils. I had received a formal acknowledgment of their arrival two days after Rodney's departure, and now came this letter, bearing the signature of Henry C. Weinbaum, whose name also appeared at the top of the paper as codirector with Rodney's uncle. It ran to two pages, and was full of effusive praise. My style, my draftsmanship, the originality of my subject matter, all came in for their share of hyperbole. Moreover it promised me a one-man show in New York if I would send enough material. The writer also suggested very diffidently—for far be it from Mr. Weinbaum, who knew so well the nature of the creative impulse, to try and jog an artist's elbow—that one or two more general pictures of Hong Kong might help to give the other work a background and place the Nam Kok in perspective.

A month ago this letter would have sent me sky-high. But now, in my state of revulsion and disillusion, I read it cynically—indeed had to make an effort to read it at all, for any reference to my pictures filled me with the same sort of nausea as the pictures themselves. I found the phraseology suspiciously overfulsome; and the emphasis on the subject matter clearly indicated an interest in sensation rather than art. Not even the prospect of making money could shake me from apathy. And I put the letter aside unanswered, thinking, “I'll try and knock something up for them one day.”

Nor did my disenchantment end with the Nam Kok and my work. It spread to the whole of Wanchai. Now in these teeming streets, which had once so stimulated and delighted me, I felt self-consciously alien, divided by a thousand barriers from the busy, noisy, spitting Chinese. I began to long for the European company that I had formerly eschewed, and only pride prevented me from ringing up those English acquaintances whom I had once so summarily dismissed as bores. Now their very dullness held nostalgia for me, for it was so comfortable, so familiar, so English. And then one day in the bank Gordon Hamilton came over to chat, stroking his handle-bar mustache, and when he said presently, “You must come and have dinner,” I was so grateful for the invitation that I could have flung my arms round his neck.

Then I remembered our last meeting in the Kowloon restaurant and said doubtfully, “But what about your wife? I don't think she exactly approved of me.”

“Don't worry, she was thoroughly ashamed of herself after that evening,” Hamilton twinkled. “In fact she kept me awake half the night, saying ‘Those poor water-front girls, I wonder what one could do to help them?' I told her, ‘I don't know, but I bet they make far more money than I do at the bank, so I can think of plenty of ways they could help us.' No, Isobel will be delighted. Make it Thursday about eight.”

“I'll look forward,” I said with a great deal more truth than he could have possibly known.

Two evenings later I took the Peak tram to a mid-level station and made my way to the Hamiltons' flat, which for a bank assistant's residence was uncommonly spacious and expensively furnished, for his wife had money of her own. I found that it was to be a dinner party for a dozen people. Isobel Hamilton greeted me warmly, trying anxiously to make amends for the offense she was afraid she had caused me; she gave me a drink, chatted for a time, and released me among the other guests.

And then there began to unfold all those threadbare little patterns of colonial cocktail-party conversation that I knew so well: that I had known first in Malaya, then during my first weeks in Hong Kong. I had the sensation of stepping back into a room where a gramophone had been endlessly playing. The grooves were perhaps a little more worn, the needle a little more blunted—but it was the same old record, and I knew every topic, every phrase. I knew with deadly certainty that no unexpected word would be uttered, no fresh viewpoint expressed. And now that the dullness became a reality, my nostalgia died within me.

Presently we went in to dinner. And at table the conversation turned to the discussion of a girl of mixed Chinese and English blood who had gone to Oxford, achieved almost unheard-of scholastic honors, qualified as a barrister, and returned to Hong Kong to practice her profession and to advance the cause of her fellow Eurasians. There were random contributions from all the guests.

“Of course she's as clever as a cartload of monkeys. But that chip on her shoulder stands out a mile.”

“I met her once. Too damned uppish.”

“That's the trouble with Eurasians. If you're nice to them, they just take advantage and begin to think they're as good as you.”

“Personally I wouldn't have her inside my house.”

“Nor would I, though mind you I'm always polite to her if I meet her in the street. I think one
should
be polite. I told her the other day, ‘My dear, you can't help being—well, you know what I mean—it's not your fault. Of course I know some people are very narrow and prejudiced—but I was brought up to believe in good manners, and I always treat Eurasians exactly like anybody else.'”

“You know she's supposed to be having an affair with Dick Kitteridge?”

“
Supposed?
My dear, she's quite flagrant about it—you don't think she could resist showing off such a feather in her cap?”

“Somebody asked me the other day, ‘Why shouldn't one marry a Eurasian?' Of course he was a young man just out from home, and rather ‘pink.' I said, ‘Are you trying to be funny?' He said, ‘No.' I said, ‘Well, because one doesn't.' He said, ‘I wonder what Jesus Christ would have said to that?' I said, ‘I don't know, and frankly, although I'm a good Christian, I don't care—because far too many people pass opinions without ever having been to China, and He couldn't possibly have judged unless He'd lived there as long as I have.'”

And this lack of charity for fellow human beings—for a minority of unhappy, race-less people fathered by ourselves—seemed to me an incomparably worse sin than any to be found at the Nam Kok; and my respect and affection for the Nam Kok girls, who were in the main incapable of such intolerance and inhumanity, came back to me in a great overwhelming flood.

We adjourned to the drawing room. Soon another guest arrived, a man in his sixties with white hair, a brown wrinkled face like an ancient tortoise, shrewd twinkling eyes, and an old-world courtesy. His name was O'Neill, and he was an “old China-hand” who had just come out of China after closing down his business under pressure from the communists; he was spending a fortnight in Hong Kong before sailing for England. He had pleaded another engagement that had prevented him from dropping in earlier, though I suspected that this had only been an excuse to shorten an evening that he had feared might prove tedious. Somehow the conversation turned once more to Eurasians, and soon the whole catalogue of colonial platitudes was being resurrected. O'Neill listened for a time and then, turning to Gordon Hamilton, said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Well, now that I'm leaving China for good I suppose I can come out with it. My grandmother was Chinese.”

There was a shocked silence. Everybody stared at him. It was true that there was a hint of Chinese in that wrinkled tortoise face and those dark twinkling eyes, though perhaps no more than in many another old China-hand—for long residence in China had a curious way of imprinting itself on the features.

“I'm rather pleased with myself for getting away with it for thirty years,” O'Neill went on, speaking to Hamilton as though unaware of the sensation he had caused.

Then the woman who had been brought up to good manners, and who had reassured the Eurasian girl that she always treated Eurasians exactly like anybody else, said, “Anyhow, Mr. O'Neill, I'm sure your grandmother came from a good-class family. That does make a difference.”